i still cant believe that two boys, MAIN CHARACTERS AT THAT, are a canon, explicitly confirmed couple in yugioh zexal
(in the original, astral uses “aishiteru” which is one of the HIGHEST forms of love in japan, NEVER used towards family OR friends bc of its strong and serious meaning)
this is in a SHOUNEN series aimed at a YOUNGER audience
like
even in the anime, we had a bisexual boy who fell in love with both the main girl and the main boy
this is such a big fucking deal and i am so mad nobody is giving a shit as much as they should bc “lol extreme ygo series hair card games for kidz bluh bluh” like THIS IS HUGE AND YOU SHOULD WATCH/READ ZEXAL???????
Actually, as a longtime YGO fan this surprises me not at all. From the original YGO we have stuff like Yuugi running into a burning building at the risk of his life to save the Puzzle with Atem inside it, and Atem saying a line the translation I read rendered rather hilariously (”I want to stay inside my partner forever” because the translator took the “living in Yuugi’s soul” thing a little too literally for this panel) but which can be understood in context to be more like “I want to stay with Yuugi always.” That’s just in the manga, too. The anime provides things like Yuugi’s “death” in the Orichalcos arc and the pair of them just constantly wandering around holding hands–which should be directly contrasted to Yuugi’s reaction to holding hands with Jyonouchi. (Neither of them are happy about it.)
The entire plot of the third season of GX revolves around “are Jyuudai and Johann lovers, or are they not?” (Literally, that’s the main source of the conflict. Yubel believes that Johann has replaced them as Jyuudai’s one true love.) The answer to that question is actually given in-show, and it’s done through action–while possessed, Johann says something like “in a moment, I’ll show you how much I love you.” It’s actually Yubel speaking, but nobody present is aware of that. The peanut gallery basically goes WAIT JOHANN SAID WHAT, while Jyuudai goes “why are you doing this to me?” He doesn’t bat a single eyelash at Johann publicly declaring his love, and in fact it’s not until “Johann” says something about love being pain that Jyuudai goes WAIT YOU’RE NOT JOHANN. You could argue that it’s Jyuudai and a whole lot slips by him, but we’re also talking about Jyuudai committing actual literal genocide (I do not use that term lightly, I mean he wholesale slaughtered potentially millions of people, many of them personally) in part because he believed Johann was dead. He literally just found out Johann is alive, is hanging on every word because this duel is deadly serious to him, and when “Johann” speaks of love he just completely doesn’t react. And on top of that, you have a nonbinary character (Yubel) who declares their love for Jyuudai as “aishiteru” and has it returned by Jyuudai, who literally makes their souls one. Yubel is female in the dub–the joke has it that it’s the only time 4Kids ever had to add breasts–but in Japan refers to themself as “boku,” has one apparently physically-male half and one apparently physically-female half, is apparently male before becoming a dragon (no breasts, short hair), and in the fourth season Jyuudai straight-up does not use pronouns for them. Sentences that should have them are structured to eliminate them–so for example, a sentence that in English would be “I would trust Yubel with my life, as she would trust me with hers!” might be set up as “I would trust Yubel with my life, as Yubel would trust me!” Part of that is the way Japanese uses pronouns, but not all.
And then you get to 5Ds. In the first two seasons Yuusei is shown as being indifferent to the girl put onscreen to be his love interest–he’s concerned about her, but at one point she literally flirts with him–”I wonder if sunsets five thousand years ago were so vivid?”–and it just flies right over his head–”probably.” Then–even if you ignore the apparently very complicated relationship between him and Kiryu in which Yuusei breaks things off in tears while saying “I can’t be with you anymore”–you get into the second half of the show, with Yuusei and Bruno and Yuusei echoing the second season’s presentation of Jack/Carley, keeping Bruno’s glasses as a keepsake after he’s gone in the same way Jack kept Carley’s (and it should be noted that although Yuusei and Bruno never trade I-love-yous, Jack and Carley do–and this is the relationship the writers chose to call back to in the endgame, with Yuusei and another man). Endgame even shows Aki trying to confess her love to Yuusei, only to change her mind–and Yuusei literally does not notice. That anything past friendship might be on her mind is totally beyond him.
So outside of GX it’s mostly been under the radar “it’s there if you pay attention” kind of stuff, with one major exception (in the mid-2000s, Shonen Jump interviewed Kazuki Takahashi, who said the main characters of DM are “mostly straight, but some are bisexual”–I can’t find the article online but if anyone owns it, or has a scan of it, please feel free to add it to this post), but on the whole the franchise has been very friendly toward adding that it’s-there-if-you-pay-attention kind of stuff.
It’s great to see that ZEXAL put it back on the radar again, though! GX is so commonly ignored by fandom that a lot of its queer-friendly themes and nontraditional relationships–and the frankly amazing story of the second half–go completely unnoticed.
Holy shit, I ended up back on my own dash.
So someone told me that the Shonen Jump article I saw years ago was actually faked by someone with too much time on their hands, sad to say. However, I feel like all I really need to say there is “Have you seen Dark Side of Dimensions? The story Takahashi said he ‘couldn’t’ write when he did the manga the first time around?”
